OUR SERVICES

Putin created the land of the leopard national park and the 

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In 2001, Jilin province established the Hunchun National Nature Reserve, a sliver of protected land running along the border with Russia and south to the small spit of Chinese territory that borders North Korea to the west and Russia to the east. Tiger numbers gradually rose, increasing 15% between 2005 and 2015.

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Ten years after the reserve was founded, Dr Ge Jianping, then vice president of Beijing Normal University, and a team of researchers started monitoring tigers in earnest, setting up cameras and looking for each animal’s unique stripe pattern in the images they caught.

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Using this data and the access to Chinese policymaking that researchers like Miquelle lacked, Ge was able to advance a proposal for a national park to replace the existing reserve. The new 14,600 km2 park, stretching 60% further than Yellowstone Park, was established in 2017 as a pilot to be incorporated into a new national park system in 2020.

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Russia created a system of protected areas that together covered the majority of the leopard range, thanks in part to support from Sergey Ivanov, the former chief of staff of Vladimir Putin. In 2012, these were merged to form the Land of the Leopard National Park, which Darman is deputy director of. That large park abuts the border with Jilin and nearly reaches Amur Bay to the east. Between 2000 and 2018, the leopard population tripled, Yury Darman, director of the Land of the Leopard National Park, told China Dialogue.

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Last year, following years of trust building and an agreement by their governments, Russian and Chinese researchers shared their monitoring data for the first time, resulting in an unprecedented survey of the transboundary leopard population, and the first reliable global population count.

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At a meeting in Moscow in June this year, presidents Xi and Putin signed a joint declaration that included reference to creating a transboundary park to protect Amur leopards and Siberian tigers, joint monitoring, and establishing nature corridors on the border.

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The park, “Land of the Big Cats,” would combine China’s Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park with Russia’s Land of the Leopard National Park and Kedrovaya Pad Nature Reserve. Putin has already ordered the preparation of the paperwork on the Russian side, and Darman expects China to announce similar moves soon, possibly at the UN Convention on Biodiversity summit in Kunming next year.

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In August 2019, policymakers and scientists from China, the United States and other countries convened in Xining, capital of the country’s Qinghai province, to discuss China’s plans to create a unified park system with clear standards for limiting development and protecting ecosystems.

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The ambition to create a unified park system represents “a new and serious effort to safeguard China’s biodiversity and natural heritage,” Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm says.

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One of the first pilot parks will be in Qinghai, a vast region in western China abutting Tibet and sharing much of its cultural legacy. The area also is home to such iconic and threatened species as the snow leopard and Chinese mountain cat, and encompasses the headwaters of three of Asia’s great waterways: the Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong Rivers.

“This is one of the most special regions in China, in the world,” says Lu Zhi, a Peking University conservation biologist who has worked in Qinghai for two decades.

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a key question looms over the project: Can China marry the goals of conservation and tourism, while safeguarding the livelihoods and culture of the approximately 128,000 people who live within or near the park’s boundaries, many of them Tibetan?

“China has a dense population and a long history,” Zhu says. “One of the unique features of China’s national parks is that they have local people living either inside or nearby.”

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Yellowstone is widely considered the world’s first national park. After it was created in 1872, the U.S. government forced the Native Americans who lived in the area to resettle outside the park boundaries, in keeping with the 19th-century notion that wilderness protection meant nature apart from people. But countries that attempt to establish park systems in the 21st century now must consider how best to include local populations in their planning.

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“Figuring out how to achieve ecological conservation and support for the communities at the same time — that’s the most complicated rub you have,” says Jonathan Jarvis, a former director at the U.S. National Park Service and now a professor of the University of California, Berkeley, who has toured the Qinghai pilot park, called Sanjiangyuan.

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China has previously undertaken vast resettlement programs to clear land for large infrastructure projects, such as Three Gorges Dam and the South-to-North Water Transfer Project. These resettlements left many farmers in new homes without suitable agricultural fields or access to other livelihoods.

But in developing the national parks, the government is giving conservation-related jobs to at least a swath of people living in Sanjiangyuan to stay and work on their land. The “One Family, One Ranger” program hires one person per family for 1800 yuan a month ($255) to perform such tasks as collecting trash and monitoring for poaching or illegal grazing activity.

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